by Blake Crouch
No chance now.
The light began to fail.
He kept replaying what had happened, trying to pinpoint the lapse in judgment, the misstep, but there wasn’t one. He had waited at the edge of that field five minutes before walking out into it. Glassed the surrounding terrain. Listened. He hadn’t rushed out into anything.
Sure he could’ve circumnavigated that piece of open country. Kept to the perimeter of the woods. That would’ve taken him the entire day.
No. You couldn’t second-guess a choice like that. There’d been nothing reckless in it.
By his reckoning, Wayward Pines lay nestled thirty or forty miles east of his position.
Four days of smooth-sailing travel.
Ten in bad weather or with minor injuries.
He was almost there, for Christ’s sake.
For the last three days he’d been climbing into high country. Fir and aspen starting to mix in with the pines. Colder mornings. He could even feel the air thinning out in those deep breaths that never quite filled his lungs.
For fuck’s sake.
Now this?
Calm down, soldier.
Secure that shit.
He shut his eyes, willed the panic to subside. A small rock lay in the leaves beside his right hand. He picked it up and began to quietly carve the forty-fifth notch into the stock of his Winchester.
Evening fell.
They hadn’t detected him, but they hadn’t left either.
It was strange—he’d witnessed abbies following scent trails before. Recalled a night he’d spent forty feet up in a pine tree. In the moonlight, he’d watched an abby pass fifty yards away, its nose to the ground, clearly on the trail of something.
Maybe it was the brook.
He’d crossed in a frenzy, but the water had come to his knees. Perhaps he’d shed his scent trail, or at least enough of it to throw them off. Truth was he didn’t know exactly how keen the abbies’ olfactory abilities were. Or what exactly they tracked. Dead skin cells? The odor of freshly trampled grass? God forbid they were as gifted as bloodhounds.
The sun dropped.
The abbies settled into the clearing.
Some of them curled into small, fetal balls against the boulders and slept.
Others lounged by the stream and dipped their claws into the current.
After a while, a band of four disappeared into the woods.
He’d never been so close to a swarm.
Hidden in the thicket, he glimpsed abbies no taller than four feet. Forty yards from where he lay, a trio of them splashed in the stream where it hooked back into the forest, their interaction an unsettling amalgamation of wrestling lion cubs and human children playing a game of tag.
He grew cold and his thirst was maddening.
He had a half-filled bottle in his pack, and he could see his thirst driving him to risk discovery and reach for it, but he wasn’t that desperate.
Yet.
At dusk, the four abbies returned from the woods.
They had brought something back, which two of their number carried between them, the creature thrashing and bleating as they emerged into the clearing.
The swarm surrounded them.
The clearing filled with clicks and screeches.
He’d heard this many times—some kind of communication.
As the abbies formed a circle, there was enough noise for Tobias to risk lifting his rifle to watch through the scope.
The hunters had caught an elk—a gangly teenage buck with the start of a rack of antlers just beginning to rise between its ears.
It stood tottering in the circle, its right hind leg badly broken, hoof raised off the ground, a white streak of bone showing through its hock.
One of the large males shoved a young abby out into the circle.
The swarm screeched in unison, talons lifting to the sky.
The young abby stood frozen.
It received another hard shove.
After a moment, it began to stalk its prey, the elk retreating awkwardly on three legs. This went on for a while like some horrifying ballet.
Suddenly, the young abby charged and flung itself at the wounded animal—talons out. The elk swung its head, connected, sent the abby sprawling back across the ground.
The swarm descended into mayhem that sounded disturbingly like laughter.
Another youngster was pushed out into the circle.
Four and a half feet tall, eighty pounds if Tobias had to guess.
It charged the elk and leapt onto its back, talons digging in, its weight bringing the wounded buck to its knees. The elk raised its head and made a helpless bugle as the young abby buried its face into the hide and slashed wildly.
The game went on, the young ones taking turns chasing the elk around the circle. Biting. Scratching. Drawing blood here and there, but none of them coming close to inflicting serious damage.
Finally, a six-foot bull jumped out into the circle, grabbed the young abby by its neck and pried it off the elk’s back. Holding the youngster up inches away from its own face, it screeched something that sounded like annoyance.
It dropped the cub and turned to the elk.
As if sensing the escalated threat, the buck struggled to stand but its hind leg was ruined.
The bull approached.
The darkness falling fast.
It leaned in toward the elk.
Raised its right arm.
The elk screamed.
The bull shrieked something and the three young abbies leapt out into the circle and piled onto the elk, eating its guts which lay spilled and steaming in the grass.
As the circle of abbies closed in to watch their young ones feed, Tobias lowered the rifle.
There was enough noise and commotion that he reached for the pack and forced his hand inside. Kept reaching and reaching until his fingers finally touched the bottle. He pulled it out, unscrewed the lid, poured the water down his throat.
He slept shivering and dreaming of all that he had seen.
The ruins of Seattle—a dense Pacific rainforest interspersed with toppled skyscrapers. The lower hundred feet of the Space Needle still standing, enwrapped in a riot of vines and undergrowth. Nothing remotely recognizable save Mount Rainier. From sixty miles away, and after two thousand years, it stood seemingly unchanged. He’d sat in a tree at the top of what had once been Queen Anne Hill and wept at the sight of that mountain while the rainforest hummed with the chattering of animals that had never seen or smelled a human being.
He dreamed of standing on a beach in Oregon.
Rock formations looming out of the mist like phantom ships.
He’d taken a stick and scrawled Oregon, United States of America in the sand. Sat watching the sun go into the sea as the tide came in and smoothed the words out of existence.
He dreamed of walking with no end in sight.
Of sleeping in trees and crossing rivers.
Dreamed of dreaming about his home in Wayward Pines. As many blankets as he wanted. A bellyful of warm food. A door that locked.
Safety behind the fence.
Sleep without fear.
And his woman.
When you come back—and you will come back—I’m gonna fuck you, soldier, like you just came home from war.
She’d scribbled those words on the first page of his journal the night before he left. She didn’t know where he was going of course, only that he probably wouldn’t make it back.
He felt so tender toward her.
And more so now than ever.
If she only knew the number of cold and rainy nights when he’d read her last words and felt the glow of comfort.
He dreamed of dying.
Of returning.
And last, he dreamed of the most terrifying thing he’d seen in a long chain of terrifying things.
He’d heard it and smelled it from ten miles away, the noise coming from an old-growth redwood forest of four-hundred-foot trees somewhere along the border of wha
t had once been California and Oregon.
As he approached, the noise became tremendous.
Like hundreds of thousands of sustained screeches.
It was the biggest risk he’d taken in his four years beyond the fence, but his curiosity wouldn’t let him turn back.
Even days after, his hearing wasn’t right. The volume ten times louder than the loudest rock concert. Like a thousand jets taking off in unison. He’d crawled toward it, covered in makeshift forest-floor camo.
At a half mile away, fear overrode his curiosity, and he couldn’t bring himself to move another foot closer.
He caught glimpses of it through the giant trees—the size of ten football stadiums, the highest spires rising several hundred feet above the canopies of the redwoods. He’d stared through the scope of his rifle and tried to process what he saw—a structure made of millions of tons of dirt and logs and rock, all cemented together with some sort of resin. From where he’d lain, it had resembled a giant piece of black honeycomb—tens of thousands of individual cells teeming with aberrations and their stores of putrefying kills.
The smell was eye watering.
The noise like a hundred thousand people being simultaneously skinned alive.
It looked utterly alien, and as he crawled away from it, the realization hit him right between the eyes.
That monstrosity was a city.
The abbies were building a civilization.
The planet was theirs.
He woke.
There was light again—a soft, tentative blue loitering in the clearing.
Everything glazed with frost and his pant legs had frozen stiff below the knee.
The abbies were gone.
He was shivering uncontrollably.
He needed to get up, get moving, take a piss, build a fire, but he didn’t dare.
No telling how long since the swarm had moved out.
The sun climbed above the cliff and sunlight hit the clearing.
Frost steamed off the grass.
He’d been awake now for three or four hours and there hadn’t been so much as the sound of a leaf twittering in the surrounding forest.
Tobias sat up.
The soreness from yesterday’s sprint fired inside every muscle—like overtightened guitar strings. He looked around, his extremities beginning to burn as the blood reached them.
Struggling to his feet, it dawned on him.
He was still breathing.
Still standing.
Somehow—alive.
Above him, the scarlet leaves in the scrub oaks glowed, backlit by the sun.
He stared past them into a blue unrivaled by any sky in his life before.
15
When Ethan woke, Theresa and Ben had already left for work and school.
He’d barely slept.
He walked naked across the frigid hardwood to the window and scraped the glaze of ice off the inside of the glass.
The light coming through was still weak enough to suggest the sun had yet to clear the eastern wall of mountains that loomed over town.
Theresa had warned him that in the heart of winter there always came a month-long span—the four weeks that framed the solstice—when the sun never made it above the cliffs that encircled Wayward Pines.
He skipped breakfast.
Grabbed a coffee to go at the Steaming Bean.
Walked south out of town.
He’d woken up with regret fermenting, like a morning-after hangover—everything still hazy from the night before and a sinking feeling he’d fucked up badly.
Because he had.
He’d told Theresa.
It was almost inconceivable.
To be fair, he’d already been messed up after seeing Kate, and his wife had used her formidable wiles to get exactly what she wanted. Truth was, he didn’t yet know how tragic of a mistake it was. Worst case—Theresa slipped, told others, and slit this town down the middle. Pilcher would call a fête. He’d lose a wife. Ben would lose his mother. It killed him to even imagine it.
On the other hand, he couldn’t deny that it had felt so damn good to finally tell someone, no less his wife. The woman from whom he was supposed to keep no secrets. If she could keep her mouth shut, if she could handle the information—no slips, no moments of weakness, no lapses, no freak-outs—then at least there was another human being to share the weight of this crushing knowledge. At least Theresa might finally understand the burden he shouldered every day of his life.
Walking down the middle of the road, he glanced up at the Wayward Pines “goodbye” sign—a family of four frozen mid-smile, mid-wave.
WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED YOUR VISIT TO WAYWARD PINES!
DON’T BE A STRANGER! COME BACK SOON!
Of course, that was only the setup to Pilcher’s grand joke.
The road simply curved back around a half mile later to deliver its hysterical punch line.
That same perfect, smiling family on a billboard, greeting everyone with:
WELCOME TO WAYWARD PINES
WHERE PARADISE IS HOME
It wasn’t that Ethan didn’t appreciate the irony, and on some level, even the humor. But considering last night and the shit-show his life was fast becoming, more than anything he just wished he’d brought his twelve gauge along to pepper those obnoxious, happy faces with buckshot.
Next time.
The proposition certainly held the promise of therapy.
He finished his coffee as he reached the woods and chucked the dregs.
Had started to crumple the Styrofoam cup when he saw something on the inside.
It was Kate’s handwriting.
In fine, black Sharpie:
3:00 a.m. Corner of Main and Eighth. Stand by the front doors of the opera house. No chip or don’t bother coming.
The tunnel door was already raised and Pam waited for him, sitting on the front bumper of the Jeep in black spandex shorts and a Lycra tank top. Her brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail but still sweat-darkened from what looked to have been a punishing workout.
Ethan said, “You look like the cover of a bad muscle car magazine.”
“I’m freezing my tits off out here.”
“You’re barely dressed.”
“Just finished ninety minutes on the bike. Didn’t figure you’d be this late.”
“I had a long night.”
“Chasing down your old flame?”
Ethan ignored this and climbed into the passenger seat.
Pam cranked the engine, gunned them out into the forest, and spun a one-eighty that would’ve flung Ethan out of the Jeep if he hadn’t grabbed the roll bar at the last second.
She floored it back into the tunnel, and as the camouflaged door closed behind them, they screamed up into the heart of the mountain.
Riding the elevator to Pilcher’s floor, Pam said, “Do me a favor this afternoon.”
“What?”
“Check in on Wayne Johnson.”
“The new arrival?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Too early to tell. He just woke up yesterday. I’ll have a copy of his file sent back to town with you, but I saw a surveillance report that indicated he had walked the road to the edge of town this morning.”
“He make it to the fence?”
“No, he didn’t leave the road, but he apparently stood there staring into the trees for a long time.”
“What do you want me to do exactly?”
“Just talk to him. Make sure he understands the rules. What’s expected. The consequences.”
“You want me to threaten him.”
“If you think that’s what’s needed. It’d be nice if you could help lead him down the path to believing he’s dead.”
“How?”
Pam grinned and punched Ethan in the arm hard enough to give him a charley horse.
“Ouch.”
“Figure it out, dummy. It can be fun, you know.”
“What? Tell
ing a man he’s dead?”
The elevator arrived, the doors parted, but when Ethan moved to exit the car, Pam’s arm shot out in front of him. She wasn’t ripped in the cartoonish female bodybuilder sense of the word, but her muscle tone was damn impressive. Lean and hard.
“If you have to tell Mr. Johnson he’s dead,” she said, “you’ve missed the entire point. He needs to arrive at that conclusion under his own steam.”
“That’s cruel.”
“No, it’s going to save his life. Because if he honestly believes there’s a world still out there, do you know what he’s going to do?”
“Try to escape.”
“And guess who gets to hunt him down? Give you a hint. Rhymes with Beethan.”
She smiled that psychobitch smile and let her arm drop. “After you, Sheriff.”
Ethan headed through Pilcher’s residence and then down the corridor to his office, where he dragged open the double oak doors and strolled in.
Pilcher was standing by the window in the rock behind his desk, staring down through the glass.
“Come here, Ethan. I want to show you something. Hurry or you’ll miss it.”
Ethan moved past the wall of flatscreens and around Pilcher’s desk.
Pilcher pointed through the glass as Pam arrived on the other side of him, said, “Now just watch.”
From this vantage point, the valley of Wayward Pines stood in shadow.
“Here it comes.”
The sun broke over the eastern wall.
Sunbeams slanting down into the center of town in a blaze of early light.
“My town,” Pilcher whispered. “I try to catch the first light that reaches it every day.”
He motioned for Ethan and Pam to take a seat.
“What do you have for me, Ethan?”
“I saw Kate last night.”
“Good. What was your play?”
“Total honesty.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I told her everything.”
“What am I missing?”
“Kate isn’t an idiot.”
“You told her you were investigating her?” There was heat in Pilcher’s words.
“You think she wouldn’t have immediately assumed that?”
“We’ll never know now, will we?”